AB 2245 Signed by Governor Brown; Bike Lanes Now Fully Exempt from CEQA

Gov. Brown at a recent event in Beverly Hills, photo by Alan Mittelstaedt for Neon Tommy

Early this morning, we received word that Governor Brown has signed AB 2245 into law. The new law provides for a CEQA exemption for Class II bikeway (bike lane) projects. Under the former guidelines, some bike lane projects in the City of L.A. would have required an EIR if their traffic impacts were over specified thresholds. While municipalities will still need to assess traffic and safety impacts, and hold public hearings to review them, the exemption allows decision makers to consider such impacts without wasting the time and resources that an EIR process requires. This will allow more effort to be placed on planning and public outreach. We’lll have more on this as we figure out what it will mean for the City of L.A. and the many bike lane projects we have in the works.

Yesterday, NBC/Universal agreed to pay $375,000 for putting in bike lanes. This in combination with removing CEQA requirements before doing some bike lane installations will lower the cost per mile of bike lanes for the city and increase the amount that can be installed.

Both of these announcements make for great news overall. This will enable the pace of installing bike lanes to increase.

For bike lanes this is unquestionably good news. For CEQA, in general, though, I worry that it is another in a series of death by a thousand cuts. My concern is that with each new exemption that happens to be environmentally friendly, we open the door just a little wider for additional exemptions that are not so friendly.

[…] (CEQA). The first draft of the legislation applied to all bicycle lane projects, but as noted on Cycleicious, during the hearing process the bill went from sixty words to more than three hundred and sixty […]

[…] in August, the re-striping will likely be the second completed bike lane project in the city under the recently passed A.B. 2245 (after the Sunset Blvd. bus bike lanes), which exempts bike lane projects with traffic impacts […]